This is the fourth and final article in our four-part series exploring Attack-A-Market and the ideas behind the new book, Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™ In this installment, we look at what happens when focus, expertise and consistent execution begin to pay off — and how a company can turn a strong position in a market into lasting leadership. Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Most companies would like to be considered a market leader. Spend enough time on corporate websites and you’ll see plenty of familiar descriptions: industry-leading, trusted expert, preferred partner, innovative leader.
The trouble is, companies don’t get to decide when they’ve earned those titles. Customers do.
That’s an important distinction when thinking about Own It., the final stage of the Attack-A-Market methodology. Owning a market doesn’t mean eliminating the competition or capturing every available customer. It means reaching a point where your company has developed a level of knowledge, credibility and trust that gives it a meaningful position in the market and makes it increasingly difficult for competitors to displace.
Getting there takes time, which is exactly why the first two stages of Attack-A-Market matter so much. Define It. gives an organization a market worthy of its focus. Attack It. puts the people, strategy and resources behind that opportunity. Own It. is what can happen when a company stays committed long enough for all of that work to compound.
You Have to Become Part of the Market
There is a noticeable difference between a company that sells into a market and one that truly understands it. The first may know its products extremely well. The second knows its customers just as well.
Its people understand how customers operate, the problems that keep coming up and the pressures shaping their decisions. They know the terminology and applications. They’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. They understand where the market has been and have informed opinions about where it may be headed next.
Much of that knowledge is accumulated slowly, through hundreds of interactions that may not seem particularly significant on their own.
- A salesperson hears the same concern from several customers
- An engineer helps solve an unusual application problem
- A service technician notices an issue appearing repeatedly in the field
- Marketing sees an unexpected surge of interest around a particular topic
Over time, those individual pieces of information become institutional knowledge.
Co-author of Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™ and DeanHoston’s Founder and Chairman, Dale Dean, sees that expertise as one of the most valuable things a company can build through a focused market strategy.
“You don’t become a leader because you decide to call yourself one,” said Dean. ‘You earn that position by understanding the market, helping customers solve real problems and doing it consistently enough that people begin to see you differently.”
That change in perception doesn’t happen overnight. In many B2B markets, particularly those with long sales cycles and highly technical products, it may take years. But once it begins to happen, the relationship between the company and the market starts to change.
Expertise Becomes More Valuable When You Share It
One of the most important parts of owning a market is making the knowledge inside the organization useful to the people outside of it.
Manufacturers often have an extraordinary amount of expertise tucked away inside their businesses.
- Engineers understand applications in remarkable detail
- Salespeople know the questions customers ask before making a decision
- Service teams know where problems occur in the real world
- Product specialists understand the small differences that can have a major impact on performance
The challenge is getting that knowledge out of people’s heads and into places where customers can benefit from it. That might mean an article that helps an engineer understand a complicated application, a guide that makes a purchasing decision easier or a video that answers a question the sales team hears every week. It might be research that gives the market a new perspective on an emerging challenge or a technical presentation that helps customers prepare for what’s coming next.
For Walter Bonnett, the book’s co-author and DeanHouston’s Executive Vice President of Strategy, that difference is central to building authority in a market.
“If you want customers to see you as an expert, you have to be willing to share your expertise,” explained Bonnett. “The companies that consistently help customers understand problems and make better decisions are building trust long before a sales conversation ever begins.”
Content alone won’t make a company a market leader, of course. But it can make the expertise already inside the organization visible, accessible and useful. When that happens consistently, a company can begin influencing the conversations taking place within the market rather than simply participating in them.
Customers Start Coming to You for More Than Products
One of the clearest signs that a company is establishing a stronger position in a market is the way customers begin interacting with it. Early in the process, most conversations are understandably centered on products, specifications, pricing and availability. As credibility grows, the questions can become broader.
Customers may begin:
- Asking for advice about an application before they’ve decided what they need
- Asking the company to be involved earlier in the development of a new project
- Ask for perspective on a problem that doesn’t have an obvious solution
- Asking what the company is seeing elsewhere in the industry
- Asking how other organizations are responding to a particular challenge
Those conversations matter because they suggest the relationship is changing. The company is no longer viewed solely as a supplier. It is becoming a resource.
That position can be especially powerful in specialized B2B markets, where purchasing decisions are rarely made on a single feature or transaction. Trust matters. Experience matters. Confidence that a partner understands the application and will still be there when something goes wrong matters.
Bonnett describes market leadership as the cumulative result of earning that confidence.
“Owning a market isn’t about being the loudest company in the room,” added Bonnett. “It’s about becoming the company customers trust because you’ve demonstrated, over time, that you understand their business and can help them succeed.”
And once that trust exists, it becomes difficult for a competitor to replicate simply by introducing a similar product or lowering a price.
Owning a Market Doesn’t Mean You’re Finished
There is another side to market leadership that is easy to overlook: the better your position becomes, the more important it is to keep earning it.
Customers change. Technology changes. New competitors arrive. Applications evolve, and problems that seemed important five years ago may be replaced by entirely different challenges.
A company that assumes it has “won” a market can eventually lose the curiosity and responsiveness that helped it become successful there in the first place.
That’s why Own It. shouldn’t be viewed as a finish line. The strongest market leaders continue listening, learning and adapting. They stay close to customers and pay attention to changes that could create new challenges or opportunities. In many cases, the knowledge gained from owning one market can even reveal the next market worth defining.
In that sense, Attack-A-Market isn’t really a linear journey with a beginning and an end. It’s a discipline that can become part of how an organization thinks about growth.
Define It. Attack It. Own It.
Over the course of this series, we’ve looked at a challenge that sounds simple on the surface: finding a market where your company can grow.
Define It. is about doing the work to determine where your organization has a meaningful opportunity to win rather than chasing every possibility that comes along.
Attack It. is about turning that decision into action by aligning the organization, learning from the market and concentrating the right resources around a shared growth strategy.
Own It. is about staying committed long enough to develop the expertise, relationships and reputation that transform a market opportunity into a durable position.
None of those stages happens because of a single campaign, sales push or breakthrough idea. They happen because an organization has made a deliberate choice about where it wants to compete and continues investing in that choice as its understanding of the market grows.
After more than 40 years of helping B2B companies pursue growth, that’s ultimately the thinking Dale Dean and Walter Bonnett set out to capture in Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™. The book may end on the final page, but for a business putting the methodology to work, that’s where a much more interesting question begins:
What market could we own next?
Explore the complete Attack-A-Market methodology and learn more about Attack-A-Market®: Define It. Attack It. Own It.™ on the Attack-A-Market landing page.